Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is all pretty meaningless if the vote counting is still done by machine. The US should go back to hand-counted pen and paper voting.
If you suspect a problem with the vote-counting machines, you can audit the paper votes with pen and paper. But in the cases where there isn't much reason to doubt the outcome of the election, you can save the cost of all that labor by letting a machine do something machines do really well.
Debian decides to allow secret votes
251–260 of 280 posts
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#252Earlier quoted context omitted.
You also want to be able to check if your vote was falsely counted, lest an unscrupulous election operator simply reassign all but a handful of votes to its preferred option. Vote selling is a pretty nasty problem to work around.
I would normally agree with you, but no voting system today can provide you an answer to this question. The problem of unscrupulous operators can be circumvented if the votes are in a public ledger where the voter can backtrack their vote to the ledger "yes, its' my vote, nobody tempered with it", but the vote in the ledger can not be linked to the voter.
Existing voting systems do have a countermeasure, if not a fantastic one: creating a trail of physical artifacts that can be manually audited to verify vote totals, and a roll of accepted votes to compare the count of said physical artifacts against. It's not fantastic because the error rates on those physical artifacts are stupendous, but tampering with votes at scale can then require (a) physical access, which humans are well-equipped to reason about, and (b) generating and destroying big piles of said physical artifact, which is expensive and expensive to hide. The gold standard of tampering with physical elections that we know of is basically denying observers the chance to audit, which is rightly considered suspicious.
Tampering with electronic votes at scale does not have these cost properties. We can magnify costs without giving voters the ability to prove their votes to a third party (I am aware there are probabilistic constructions), but all such constructions (a) are much harder for the average voter to reason about than monitoring physical access (humans are quite optimized for monitoring physical access), yet (b) requires voters to actually audit their own votes and report non-inclusion en masse. You can see why this is a non-starter.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#253A brief summary because I had to re-read this a few times to figure out what was going on. Debian had a vote with 4 options: Option 1 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote" Option 2 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote and allow verification" Option 3 "Reaffirm public voting" Option 4 "None of the above" (NOTA) The objection raised here is that Option 3 and Option 4 can be consi…
It's not about splitting the vote in that way; Debian's system is robust to that. It's about the 3:1 supermajority requirement that was needed for Option 1 and Option 2. It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this.
Yet Another case for approval voting over like, all other voting systems.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#254Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't so different in the EU is it? Smaller countries don't want their needs ignored by the bigger countries so they get more seats relative to their population than big countries. Maybe it's hard to imagine the United States of American to become 50 independent countries but isn't the way you keep them united is by promising the smaller ones that they won't be trampled on by the big ones?
> isn't the way you keep them united is by promising the smaller ones that they won't be trampled on by the big ones? Yes, but in the US, at least, it's gotten to the absurd opposite where the minority is more or less assured a majority of votes. In order to avoid tyranny of the majority, we've more or less codified tyranny of the minority.
It would be more helpful to describe what a state of affairs looks like that doesn't result in large population states, who already maintain the gift/grift of cultural hegemony, running the country.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#255Earlier quoted context omitted.
This isn't so different in the EU is it? Smaller countries don't want their needs ignored by the bigger countries so they get more seats relative to their population than big countries. Maybe it's hard to imagine the United States of American to become 50 independent countries but isn't the way you keep them united is by promising the smaller ones that they won't be trampled on by the big ones?
Nobody wants full democracy. Full democracy is what allowed Hitler to get away with gassing six million Jews, just because the majority of the population agreed it was a good idea at the time. Now Germany has very strict constitutional protections of certain rights to make it very hard for the majority to violate the minority like that again. State rights act similarly, protecting the populations of individual states…
What election are you referring to where the Germans democratically gave Hitler power? His best "fair" election results saw his party get ~35% of the vote, and he only got the largely ceremonial chancellorship through backdoor deals. By the time he became president nobody could consider the elections fair.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#256This is good. Secret ballot empowers voters. Public ballot only makes sense if the voter is a representative of other people and they want their record public for continued support.
It's fine to say "OSS developers don't owe anybody anything" in general, but Debian specifically has quite a strict vetting procedure before accepting people as developers and they agree to things like the Debian Social Contract[1] which includes: " Debian believes the makers of a free software operating system should provide guarantees when a user entrusts them with control of a computer. [...] Not hiding problems w…
Look at systemd, if you voted against having only one init system back in the day, you would be subject to backlash or it could be understood as support for the Devuan forkers.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#257Earlier quoted context omitted.
Stated differently, this makes states matter and rural voters matter in direct proportion to the number of people living there, because all people are equal. It's not right that a voter in Maine or New Hampshire, which have 1.3 million people and are roughly even between the two major parties, has a high probability of changing the outcome with their vote, while a voter in California or Texas - which have 30 times as…
This isn't so different in the EU is it? Smaller countries don't want their needs ignored by the bigger countries so they get more seats relative to their population than big countries. Maybe it's hard to imagine the United States of American to become 50 independent countries but isn't the way you keep them united is by promising the smaller ones that they won't be trampled on by the big ones?
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#258Adds even more politics to tech decisions. Seems obvious what the result will be.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#259A brief summary because I had to re-read this a few times to figure out what was going on. Debian had a vote with 4 options: Option 1 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote" Option 2 "Hide identities of Developers casting a particular vote and allow verification" Option 3 "Reaffirm public voting" Option 4 "None of the above" (NOTA) The objection raised here is that Option 3 and Option 4 can be consi…
It's not about splitting the vote in that way; Debian's system is robust to that. It's about the 3:1 supermajority requirement that was needed for Option 1 and Option 2. It turns out that their rules for dealing with this work by comparing those options against NOTA only; the problem is that it's plausible that many of the voters didn't realise this.
And that the super majority was achieved by 1 vote. So in some sense it was a cliff hanger.
But 3 to 1 is a large margin, which likely has a bit of fat. I'm not uncomfortable with it.
Re: Debian decides to allow secret votes
#260Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I don't understand the argument of reducing cost of elections and scaling. How about if we could scale ballots to such an extent that a citizen can vote from wherever/whenever on all issues they're interested in[1], not just a head of state election every X years? Wouldn't that be a more democratic process ? I believe it would, and that paper ballots won't get us there. [1] A current instance of this is the Swiss v…
Well, I live in a representative democracy, and it mostly works. I don't think the vote is only way to express political power, just the most 'sacred' and extreme of all. The one of removing your ruler (or ruling party) from power. And making people vote on issues they're interested in just makes me think only extremes will be heard and counted, and I would have to give my opinion on a bunch of things I don't really…
Indeed, the voting is less about getting people you want to have power, but more about preventing people you don't want from getting power (or retaining the power). Votes don't directly affect the actual policy decisions that representatives make afterwards, you're not legally bound to fulfill your campaign promises. What voting process does instead is telling the society, ‘See, the elected officials are not massively hated by the people, no need for a concern’.
The thing about representative democracy is that your representative is still your representative even if you didn't vote for them.